Hi all,

This is my first post to this forum, but I've been a slackware user for several years now.

I just upgraded from an 8.1 installation to 9.1. Everything is working fine, but whenever I run an xterm, the following pops up:

Usage: -a <slave-device-name> <host>
-d <slave-device-name>


The xterm window appears, and everything works fine, but this warning is odd and confusing to me. I can't figure out if it's being generated by xterm itself, or by something that runs during xterm's startup.

A little more info:

1. It happens both as root and normal user.
2. It happens in Gnome, as well as when using eXceed on a windows box.
3. The upgrade added the new packages, and also upgraded my kernel from 2.2.19 to 2.4.22.

I've searched Google, but I'm not finding any answers. Thought I'd ask if anyone here had some ideas of what this might be caused by.

Thank you.

Looks like it might be talking about your X server, (e.x. slave-device = your computer, host = X server host)

seems like nothing to get worried about though, also does it happen with other X based terminals, like aterm or eterm?

Wanted to let you all know that I resolved the issue and I thought I'd post the response.

I spoke to a linux guru at my office, and he suggested that I run strace to get the output of xterm.

Examining this output, it was clear that the error message was being generated by a call to utempter.

Checking /var/log/packages, I noticed that two versions were installed.

I did a removepkg on both versions of utempter, and then used swaret to get the latest.

All is well!

Thanks!